by Jonathan Kujawa

One of my favorite areas of mathematics is Ramsey theory. In fact, my first 3QD essay was about F. P. Ramsey and his marvelous result which launched the field. It is one of those rare parts of mathematics where the results are often easy to understand, hard to prove, and yet delightfully surprising. Just last week came a breakthrough in Ramsey theory which I’d like to tell you about.

Meta-mathematically, Ramsey theory tells us that order unavoidably emerges whenever something is sufficiently large. Even if the structure is completely random or, worse, fiendishly crafted by a nefarious opponent, order cannot help but be found.

Ramsey theory is almost philosophical. How is it that consciousness emerges from our complicated neural network? Or that life appeared from the rich soup of prebiotic molecules in the Earth’s ancient waters? Once you know about Ramsey theory, such things seem more inevitable than miraculous. As Ian Malcolm said, “life finds a way”.

Ramsey theory comes in numerous flavors. Once you know to look for order inside large scale structures, you start finding it everywhere. In Ramsey’s original theorem, he showed that any group of six or more must have three people who are all friends or all strangers [1]. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Some good news, amongst all the bad this month. Our medieval Supreme Court took a break from being irredeemably awful to decide a case in the right way for the right reason. In Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia, Neil Gorsuch –  yes, that Neil Gorsuch, the one nominated to the court by Donald Trump, who once ruled against a man in an unlawful termination case for leaving a truck by the side of the road rather than freezing to death in it – wrote the decision for himself, Chief Justice John Roberts and the four more liberal justices. The Court concluded that an employer violates the law – specifically, Title VII of the Civil Right Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin – “when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex…” including sexual orientation and gender identity. “It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff’s sex contributed to the decision,” the Court affirmed, and, for the first time, ruled that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

With uncharacteristic clarity, Gorsuch explained why gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination are sex discrimination:

Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague. Put differently, the employer intentionally singles out an employee to fire based in part on the employee’s sex, and the affected employee’s sex is a but-for cause of his discharge. Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge.

That this is the right decision will be self-evident to progressives and LGBT+ advocates, so let’s focus on why this case was decided for the right reason. Read more »

Joseph Rovegno via justiceforgeorgenyc Instagram. Black Lives Matter Protests, June 2020.

(with permission from the artist).

More here and here (JR is raising funds for BLM and ACLU … do check out the links).

by David Kordahl

Physics writing, let’s face it, is usually pretty boring. In a recent essay for Tablet, Adam Kirsh diagnosed one reason for this. When physicists write non-technical literature, they often begin with the assumption that the world as revealed by physics is the real one, and that the job of physicists, when they speak to the poor math illiterates, is to show them how best to live with this tormenting truth. As Kirsh puts it, “Popular physics writing is best understood as therapy for this torment—as metaphysical self-help.”

Those of us who have spent time with physicists might question whether they (or we, if I include myself) are temperamentally suited, on average, to be therapists. We might also wonder if the world described by physics is the real one, though I’ll set that question aside for today. Today, I’m interested in a style that captures not the real world, whatever that is, but the real world of physics—or, more plainly, the social world of physicists.

To capture this world as it is (not, of course, as it should be) might require a certain anti-therapeutic nastiness. This possibility is on my mind because last month I read Quantum Profiles, Second Edition, by the physicist Jeremy Bernstein. Though Bernstein shares most of the baseline prejudices of his fellow physicists, he isn’t boring, and he certainly isn’t nice—after all, his subject is physicists, not just physics. The first edition of Quantum Profiles came out in 1990, and since then its size has nearly doubled, inflated with rants and investigations, a graveyard of settled scores. Read more »

by Paul Orlando

I have a friend who is a self-described “cop magnet.” He’s been arrested six or seven times, just standing there.

I understand why. He looks like trouble. A propensity for wearing all black clothing. A shaved head and a full beard. Multiple tattoos; never smiles. He’s a gentle and intellectual person, but you’d never guess from looking at him.

It’s an undesirable problem to have, looking guilty. There was even a case of a man in Taiwan, who similar to my friend, looked so much like a potential (not actual) Triad member (with the expected police reaction), that he had plastic surgery to make himself look nicer. My friend deals with law enforcement run-ins by avoiding signs of aggression and keeping his eyes down. That being said, his techniques obviously don’t work perfectly when it comes to a police officer’s presumptions.

As we move to an artificial intelligence-fueled world, including in law enforcement, what will change? Is AI in law enforcement presumption that you can blame on something else? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

In the early 2000s, when I was expecting my first child, I became acutely aware of ‘skin’. Not only had my skin stretched beyond imagination without splitting, but it had taken on a dark glow that made my brownness stand out amidst the light-skinned London neighbourhood I lived in. Pregnancy cravings for desi food meant that I made frequent trips to the nearby Asian area of Tooting, where I would often bump into elderly Asian aunties. These women would take one look at my pale-skinned husband and offer me sincere advice to drink milk with saffron so that the child may take after his father. I would jokingly retort that if milk made skin tone lighter, why would buffaloes be black? But afterwards, I would mull over these little ‘well-meaning’ acts of microaggression and wonder if my dark skin tone made me any less worthy.

I was reminded of this when, in the wake of the tragic killing of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Movement, Unilever dropped the word ‘fair’ from its skin-lightening cream, ‘Fair & Lovely’. But if the idea was to support the fight against racism, why not just drop the skin-lightening cream? The answer lies in the complex tangle of colonialism and colourism — each a legacy of the other.  Like many African Americans who have varying skin tones due to the history of slavery and unfair sexual exploitation, many in South Asia, due to the advent of Persian and Central Asian invaders and later through the 200-year rule of the British, have complexions that range from chocolate brown to milky white. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

Lately I’ve been craving the music of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). As reality continues to be fraught, in the midst of a pandemic, social unrest, culture wars, and on and on, Ravel’s music offers an enticing escape. Described by his close friend, concert pianist Ricardo Viñes, as “inclined by temperament toward the poetic and fanciful,” Ravel created music that continues to captivate with its otherworldly beauty. Another reason for his appeal now, when the public health crisis has disrupted all of our quotidian rhythms, is that rhythm is the sine qua non of Ravel’s art. All you have to do is listen to Bolero, for which he is best known, to perceive this on a visceral level. And yet Ravel is much more than Bolero, as he would have been the first to tell you. He considered that piece more of an experiment or a gageure–a wager with himself that he could turn one musical phrase into an orchestral composition, and he referred to it as “orchestral tissue without music.” It consists of one main theme that is repeated and embellished throughout. Its genius lies in the orchestration. Ravel’s skills as an orchestrator, his devotion to rhythm, and his “passion for perfection,” in the words of biographer Madeleine Goss, are his enduring legacies. Read more »

Cat in the Domplatz in Brixen, South Tyrol, in June of 2015.

by Brooks Riley

Being Korean is a behavioral science all its own. There are formalities at all levels of society and potential affronts lurking in every social engagement. Ageism is set in stone, and in honorifics that define older or younger persons, friends, siblings and relatives, as well as differing levels of social standing. Personal humiliations are many and varied, some of them universally recognizable, some of them exclusive to Korea’s tight-knit family structures or evident hierarchies. It goes beyond how to address someone: How to drink soju, how to pour it for a superior, how to bow, when to bow, who to bow to, when to get down on your knees—the list goes on.

This is why the title of the magnificent Studio Dragon series My Mister is unable to quite capture the honorific implications of Ahjussi, a man who is one’s elder by at least 20 years, who may or may not be your uncle. No matter. Part of the pleasure of watching this Netflix series is marveling at the many ways that behavior is stratified without harming the spontaneity and pleasures of social interaction.

If there’s a double helix running through the Korean psyche, then it consists of two strands, han (한) and jeong (정) two concepts that seem to infuse Koreans with states of mind that their dark history of multiple occupations has delivered right to their genes. Read more »

by Katie Poore

Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt is a string pulled so tightly it is on the verge, always, of snapping. It is like this from the first sentence, when our protagonist Lydia Quixano Alvarez’s 8-year-old son, Luca, finds himself in a rain of bullets while he uses the bathroom. By the second page, sixteen members of Lydia and Luca’s family are dead, murdered by the reigning drug cartel of Acapulco, Mexico.

I found American Dirt gripping, unrelentingly so. Every fifty pages I had to stop, breathe, do something else. It isn’t a book I could devour, mostly because I couldn’t stomach some of the endless grief it contained for more than an hour or two at a time. It felt grueling, and riveting, and so utterly foreign.

But American Dirt has, since before its release in January, been the subject of controversy and scrutiny, precisely because it is so utterly foreign, and because Cummins could not and has not undergone the traumas and trials of her protagonists. Cummins’ publisher, Flatiron Books, canceled her book tour due to the backlash. Read more »

by Timothy Don

The current economic crisis is crushing artists, museums, and galleries everywhere. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, an exorbitant rental market made maintaining a practice difficult before this crisis hit. It’s even harder now. With 3QD’s permission, I’m going to use this column to talk about the work of some of the artists and art professionals I have met in the Bay Area. I ask you to support artists wherever you find them and however you can.

Roman Women XIII, by Sara VanDerBeek, 2013. Digital c-print, 66 x 47 3/4 in. From the series Roman Women.

A digitally manipulated and synthetically colored contemporary photograph of a sculptural object from classical-era Rome, this piece looks at first glance like a picture postcard, memento of a delightful afternoon spent at the Vatican museum. Look more closely, however: in subject matter and method, the work addresses and bridges in one stroke both the ancient world and our present moment. It projects the textures and patinas of the past onto the flat screens of the present, and it resituates that present as a way station on the journey through time of images and ideas, meanings and ideologies. It is both art and artifact.

We have become accustomed over the last several hundred years to an image of antiquity hewn from white marble: clean, harmonious, and transcendent; conceptually pure, flawlessly executed. In a word: Classical. Recent historical research, however, suggests that Roman statuary, along with the Greek originals that it copied, was polychromatic, embellished, and almost luridly vibrant. Sara VanDer Beek recalls this aspect of classical art by saturating her photograph with a shade of violet approaching Tyrian purple. She reminds us that classical doesn’t mean white. Classical was colorful.

Her aim, however, is not merely to introduce visual facticity to the historical record. This is a photograph of a copy of a lost original. It is the top layer in a stack of reproducible objects, evidence of the layering effect of and through which history is composed. This picture is then-and-now, uniquely contemporary in its utilization of present-day technologies of representation, archival in its reinscription of that technology within a geneology of visual representation dating back to the birth of western civilization. This piece accomplishes the same movement (from past to present and back again) with regard to its subject matter: the human female form. Read more »

by Ali Minai

“I’ll just google it again”, said my daughter when I asked her to remember something. It was a very reasonable suggestion, but it led me down an interesting line of thought about the nature of knowing and its recent transformation. Much has been said and written about how the Internet has changed human knowledge, in both positive and negative ways. The positives are obvious. The magic of the Internet, the World-Wide Web, and utilities such as Google and Wikipedia, have put enormous knowledge at our disposal. Now any teenager with a smartphone has effortless access to far more information than the greatest minds of a century ago. Even more importantly, the Internet has opened up vast new possibilities of learning from others, and allowed people to share ideas in ways that were unimaginable until recently. Not surprisingly, all this has led to a great flowering of knowledge and creativity – though, unfortunately, not without an equally great multiplication of error and confusion.

In terms of negative consequences, perhaps the most widely explored idea is that of epistemic bubbles – closed informational ecosystems enabled by social media connecting largely like-minded individuals. With little external input and minimal internal dissent, people in such bubbles can quickly fall prey to outlandish beliefs without the possibility of correction. The hazard of epistemic bubbles is compounded by the Internet’s facilitation of false information – fake news, so to speak. Of course, neither epistemic bubbles nor false information is new, but the Internet has supercharged both by lowering the barriers to entry so far that random TikTok personalities and Twitter ideologues can have a degree of influence that was previously reserved for a small, better-informed elite. On the positive side, this democratization of information has broken through the systematic indoctrination that elites have imposed on societies throughout history. At the same time, it has also led to an unprecedented undermining of facts and the disintegration of a shared experience of reality. But my concern in this article is with a more subtle, well-known – but perhaps insufficiently understood – effect of the Internet on human knowing: The externalization of knowledge and its consequences for creative thought. Read more »

by Fabio Tollon

You’ve heard about AI. Either it’s coming for your job (automation), your partner (sex robots), or your internet history (targeted adverts). Each of the aforementioned represent very serious threats (or improvements, depending on your predilections) to the economy, romantic relationships, and the nature of privacy and consent respectively. But what exactly is Artificial Intelligence? The “artificial” part seems self-explanatory: entities are artificial in the sense that they are manufactured by humans out of pre-existing materials. But what about the so-called “intelligence” of these systems?

Our own intelligence has been an object of inquiry for human beings for thousands of years, as we have been attempting to figure out how a collection of bits of matter in motion (ourselves) can perceive, predict, manipulate and understand the world around us. Artificial Intelligence, as eloquently surmised by Keith Frankish and William Ramsey, is

“a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding, modeling, and replicating intelligence and cognitive processes by invoking various computational, mathematical, logical, mechanical, and even biological principles and devices.”

AI attempts not just to understand intelligent systems, but also to build and design them. Interestingly enough, it may be the case that we could in fact design and build an “intelligent” system without understanding the nature of intelligence at all. Important to keep in mind here is the distinction between narrow (or domain specific) and broad (or general) AI. Narrow AI are systems that are optimized for performing one specific task, whereas broad AI systems aim at replicating (and surpassing) many (if not all) capacities associated with human intelligence. Read more »